Job Opening
Job Opening: CEO of a big R&D Lab
Just when you thought that none of the good jobs are advertised in the newspaper any more, here’s a nice opportunity if you happen to be looking for a high level R&D management job. There’s an opening for a new CEO at the UK’s top R&D agency for spies, the Defense Science Technology Laboratory near Salisbury. You can read the full ad in The Sunday Times of London.
This raises two quite interesting questions.
First, can you imagine recruiting for a job that like through the want ads? It seems highly implausible. Does a government regulation require them to post this ad in the paper? Ah, bureaucracy!
Second, and more interesting, is the job itself: Running an R&D center with 3000 employees and a budget of about $700 million in a world of increasing divisiveness and terrorism. Key technologies they’ll be working on in the coming years would have to include bomb detection, surveillance, satellite imagery analysis, satellite photography, etc. Great technical challenges, and solving them brings great benefits to the broader world..
The challenge, however, is that an R&D agency like this - and indeed any R&D outfit - eventually answers two very different masters, the demands of the bureaucracy (yup) and the demands of innovation. There’s a conflict between these two, a very difficult conflict to manage. The bureaucracy - remember, it’s a government job! - will create pressure for regularity, conformity, and standardization, all innovation-killers. The culture of innovation, on the other hand, requires openness to novelty, risk-taking, curiosity, lots of trial and error, and a heavy dose of failure, none of which go over well in a bureaucratic setting.
Will they find the person who can bridge these two worlds, and provide some sound leadership in the technology domain as well? Perhaps they will. And perhaps the right person is you! Don’t procrastinate, though - the closing date on the position is September 4.
To see the newspaper ad: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/Class/Jobs/job/0,,599849,00.html
To see the headhunter site and download the full brief: http://www.odgers.com/c/@ssBLYXu2TOz4Q/Pages/positions.html?job@10879
Good luck!